Iraq and Global Jihad

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A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

Not exactly surprising. Peter Bergen had a piece in Mother Jones in 2004 titled “The Wrong War.” He wrote:

In more than a dozen interviews, experts both within and outside the U.S. government laid out a stark analysis of how the war has hampered the campaign against Al Qaeda. Not only, they point out, did the war divert resources and attention away from Afghanistan, seriously damaging the prospects of capturing Al Qaeda leaders, but it has also opened a new front for terrorists in Iraq and created a new justification for attacking Westerners around the world. Perhaps most important, it has dramatically speeded up the process by which Al Qaeda the organization has morphed into a broad-based ideological movement — a shift, in effect, from bin Laden to bin Ladenism. “If Osama believed in Christmas, this is what he’d want under his Christmas tree,” one senior intelligence official told me. Another counterterrorism official suggests that Iraq might begin to resemble “Afghanistan 1996,” a reference to the year that bin Laden seized on Afghanistan, a chaotic failed state, as his new base of operations.

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